The present invention relates to communications devices and more particularly to a compact, portable communications device.
Through the spread of new information systems, such as Internet, E-mail, and radiotelephone, which are essentially based on serial data exchange, the need to carry the associated information contents with one as data, even if one is away or meets with acquaintances or friends, increases. The carriers for such data should therefore be easy to take along, and the data thereon should be easy to replace and reproduce. Such a concept, beside the known, publicly accessible communications systems, permits xe2x80x9csocial broadcastingxe2x80x9d at the personal level.
A portable communications device including: an input/output radio interface, for local data exchange; a data processing device coupled to the radio interface; a memory device coupled to the radio interface; and, means for manually activating the radio interface to send or receive data to be locally exchanged; wherein: a local data exchange takes place between a first communications device and a second apparatus selected from the group consisting of: a second like communications device, a data processing device adapted to the local data exchange, a data-reproducing device, and an adapted data source; a range of the input/output radio interface is short compared with the range of a conventional radio interface for data transfer, and corresponds essentially to a talking distance; the memory device and the data processing device serve to both control and temporarily store and/or process data to be exchanged; and, different data sequences of the local data exchange are identified and selectively retrievable in the memory device.